Institutional capture strikes again
Katy (erstwhile Colin) Montgomerie gave a staff pride talk at Edinburgh University yesterday.
Yeah congrats. There’s nothing like inviting a man to talk about how horrible feminists are for making students feel empowered…unless they’re female students of course.
They don’t teach flat earth or creationism in school but they do teach that men who say they are women are women.
We know the answer to that, he’ll go as far as he possibly can. Always.
What I wonder is why staff at Edinburgh would want to hear a talk by Katy (erstwhile Colin) Montgomerie.
Even in the thumbnail version embedded in the post in the more distant, full body shot, it is apparent that the person in the dress standing in front of the screen is a male. The shoulder to hip ratio is a dead giveaway. The face may pass, but his physique does not.
Montgomerie denying the very real, well documented possible complications of a vaginoplasty is just par for the course of dishonesty on pretty much any topic that jokers like him talk about.
“TWAW.” “This never happens.” etc., (“TERFS are violent genocidal monsters.”)
Actually, he’s right about one thing. I don’t teach flat earth or creationism in my biology classes. They are nonsense. That’s also why I teach that humans are sexually dimorphic, and that men and women have distinct body structures. This didn’t even need to be demonstrated by science (though it has been); it is evident to anyone who has ever seen both sexes (at least, if they’ve seen more than a handful of carefully selected individuals).
They are using a circular argument when they argue otherwise; they rely on the trans to show that we are not sexually dimorphic; then they use this to say that there is no problem having trans in women’s spaces.
There is this outfit called the Atheist Community of Austin (ACA), “dedicated to promoting atheism, critical thinking, secular humanism, and the separation of religion and government.” Fair enough. They have some call-in shows where (mostly) theists call in to expound on their religion, or belief in god, or their proof that god exists, or whatever. The hosts make a good-faith effort to engage with these callers and have a rational conversation with them. Some of these conversations are rational and enlightening; some less so, and a good fraction turn into train wrecks. I started listening a few years ago–initially for the train wrecks.
On anything having to do with religion, or spirituality, or belief, or faith–any of the core issues for a discussion between a theist and an atheist–the hosts are unfailingly compassionate, and rational, and evidence-based. But every now and then some trans issue comes up, and it all goes out the window. The hosts have drunk the Kool-Aid, they spout the trans dogma and they will brook no dissent.
There is a rotating cast of people who host these shows, and some of these hosts are trans (Montgomerie is one of them). I find listening to men LARPing women (and vice-versa) annoying, but I tried to set that aside on the grounds that ideas should be evaluated on their merits, not their source. But after a while it got toooo annoying, so I started skipping shows with trans hosts. But it wasn’t just the trans hosts. There are hosts who are not trans, and are scientists, and I listened to these hosts tie themselves in knots trying to hold a position that conforms to both the science and the trans ideology, and of course there isn’t one. Finally I gave up and stopped listening altogether.
Few weeks ago, I was bored, I pulled up the latest show, checked that the hosts were not trans, and started listening. The second caller had a question about trans issues. He started by saying that he hesitated for a long time before making the call for fear of being called transphobic. The host asks why the caller is concerned about that. The caller hesitates, and the host breaks in and says
It was painful. Cringing, cult-level, hair-shirt, purity-spiral, mea culpa–and the host had to get it out there. In fact, the hosts never addressed the substance of the caller’s question. The only thing that mattered was to show that they were sufficiently prostrate before the idol of trans.
I stopped listening again, probably for good this time.
These things aren’t (widely) taught anymore, but that’s because there were public arguments about them for centuries. As we all know, creationism in the form of Intelligent Design was still being taught in public schools in the States in the 21st century.
It’s one thing to teach settled science and refer doubters to centuries worth of argument and evidence. It’s quite another to proclaim that people should be treated just like the opposite sex, in law and social policy, if they say they feel they “really are” that sex, and anybody who doubts any of this is a bigot.
The difficult area for me involves well-meaning educated liberal-leaning people who insist that “modern” science has “proved” sex is a spectrum and gender identity is a real thing and all that, and those of us who “cling” to the “outdated” ideas about binary sex are the science deniers.
It must be nice to hold forth at a university and not be shouted down by a crowd holding placards telling you to die. Which side was the hateful one again?
I remember when I was in uni for biology. They didn’t teach young Earth creationism in lectures of course, but the university permitted a YEC dude to book a hall on uni grounds to preach his nonsense. I was informed of it while in a prac with a lot of downtime in the middle, and was encouraged to attend it to see how unscientific and silly the guy’s arguments were. I then stuck around for the QA to… ask questions. No shouting, no hogging the QA time, just probing his theory to point out his mistakes.
These people think the pro-science thing to do is shout down the opposition because it is all they know; they haven’t the faintest idea that the side of science is advanced by dialogue.
Sackbut: In the late 19th/early 20th century, it was considered “science” to measure skulls to prove the superiority of one race (and the inferiority of others). It was pseudoscience then, trans ideology is pseudoscience now.
Brian M, I’m sure we here all agree it’s pseudoscience, but it is frustratingly difficult to deal with other people. Specifically, in this instance, well-meaning, liberal, science-oriented, educated people who are pushing against creationism and flat-earthism on one hand while promoting gender identity ideology on the other, in the name of doing “proper” science. They believe science and facts are on their side, and they think people claiming there are two sexes are just like people who claim the Earth was created 6000 years ago, that both are promoting outdated ideas that have been superseded by more recent results. My point is, telling people to stick to science and evidence and facts doesn’t seem to work when people agree with the sentiment but think that’s exactly what they are doing already.
It’s obviously easy for a non-biologist to be intimidated by techno-babbel about chromosomes, hormones, “intersex” conditions, or statistical correlations on the level of the brain between trans people and their “target sex*”. Luckily, I don’t think you need a PhD in molecular biology or neuroscience to recognize the most glaring contradictions, circular definitions (or no definitions at all**), equivocations (or, as I like to call them, “bad puns”), conflating separate categories (that one has specifically told everyone else not to conflate), proofs by assertion/loudness/endless repetitions, blatant misrepresentations of the views of opponents etc. etc. Such fatal flaws on the most basic, fundamental level cannot be fixed on the higher levels any more than a skyscraper can be fixed by working on floors 11-100 (the “chromosome” floors) when floors 1-10 (the basic logic floors) are not even able to support their own weight.
Any normally intelligent person willing to give it a minimum of thought should be able to identify these flaws. That being the case you quickly run out of excuses for not doing so. Beyond a certain point the only kind of ignorance is the willful kind, and on the topic of gender ideology I think we passed that point years ago. Anyone who still hasn’t noticed the elefant in the room at this point (or pretends not to notice) can’t possibly have made much of an honest effort to do so (and once again, starting from a fixed conclusion and engaging in cherry-picking and motivated reasoning to force facts and logic to fit does not count as an “honest effort”). That being the case I don’t think “well meaning” is how I would describe these people at this point.
* How, by their own standards, are they supposed to identify which people belong to the “target sex”?
** Imagine a physicist refusing to provide a coherent definition of, say, “entropy”, and even insisting that the very question of how you define entropy is inherently illegitimate.
It’s easy, too, for certain biologists and a sizable number of medical professionals. Several medical professionals I know range from “just be kind” acceptance without close examination of the data, to strong transactivists. PZ Myers is a special case, but he is not the only person well-educated in the biological sciences who really should know better. And people who are not biologists quote him and the others to “prove” their points.
I suppose the thing to do is to squirrel away a bunch of links to resources to provide in order to counter the many “appeal to authority” arguments.
And of course this slide was in there: https://t.co/W18e0DG3CU